


a long way left to go

by mollivanders



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Past Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-18
Updated: 2011-06-18
Packaged: 2017-10-29 17:50:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/322528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mollivanders/pseuds/mollivanders
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kara started looking for the pattern before she can remember painting it, remembers finding it in odd places.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a long way left to go

**Author's Note:**

> **Title: a long way left to go**  
>  Fandom: Battlestar Galactica  
> Rating: PG  
> Characters: Kara, Lee, Helo, Zak, Leoben, Dreilide, Socrata, light Kara/Lee and Kara/Zak  
> Author's Note: For the Help Queensland Auction, with the request of Kara-centric fic (and permission for Kara/Lee). I never expected getting into Kara's headspace to be this demanding but I'm mildly proud of the result. [Here](http://borrowedfable.dreamwidth.org/45704.html) is the requested poem-for-inspiration and [here](http://daybreak777.livejournal.com/225002.html?thread=2596842#t2596842) is the vid I listened to, for kicks.  
> Word Count - 2,023

Kara started looking for the pattern before she can remember painting it, remembers finding it in odd places.

Her dinner plate, a garden of flowers outside her family’s house, in the bruised blood vessels on her arm after her mother’s fallen asleep, too drunk to bother with her anymore.

It is a long time before she thinks to look to the sky.

She doesn’t know what they are, doesn’t understand what they mean. Dreilide tells her they’re called _stars_. Conspiratorially, he whispers that they represent time and their ancestors who travelled from them millennia ago.

(He tells her, once, of how people used to think the stars were the homes of the gods. This, she thinks, makes the most sense, but it is never mentioned again.)

“Why are they so far away?” she asks and Dreilide laughs.

“Because they had a long way to come,” he tells her, pointing out the colonies and how much farther away the rest of the universe is.

“But then how did we get here?” she asks, insistent.

“We flew like notes on the wind,” he explains, fingers tapping in the air and Kara feels a chill, remembers the birds she’s seen flying, falling from the sky. She cranes her neck, trying to count the stars, doesn’t understand how people didn’t tire of travelling before they came here.

“So we’re like birds then,” she says quietly and Dreilide pats her on the shoulder.

“Not anymore,” he answers.

Kara doesn’t accept it, wants to get closer to the stars, to see if the pattern exists there too. The stars (planets, constellations, galaxies) all look the same from where she stands, small on the surface of Caprica. They burn her eyes when she stares too long into the darkness, tiny bursts of light twinkling out from space, and still, she wants more. She begins playing alone at night, sleeping during the day. It’s quiet at night, and peaceful; no mothers to chase her or fathers to leave her.

More than the silence of space, she’s drawn to the vastness of the only place from which the pattern does not wink out at her.

(She still sees it in her dreams, and when Socrata wakes her.)

Over time, she forgets about the pattern, forgets about finding it everywhere. There is no more Dreilide to explain the stars to her; there are only nights spent on the run from Socrata, stumbling over Caprica’s sharp grass and through its willowy trees, trying to find the open spaces where she feels most at peace.

Where she feels safe.

Even forgotten, the pattern winks out at her.

Her mother has told her stories about the war, about hiding from the clanking machines in bunkers and diving for cover from a splatter of bullets. The stories do not frighten Kara, coming from the lips of a drunken woman who cannot let go of her missed chances.

Barely a teenager, running through the plains outside Caprica City, Kara scoffs. She is not her mother.

She is not afraid.

Socrata mocks her when Kara enlists in the service, tells her she’ll never be good enough, tough enough. She tries to shake Kara, but she’s too tall to bully now.

“You’ll never make it out alive,” her mother insists and Kara steps outside.

“Then you’ll finally be happy, won’t you?” she answers, memorizes the look on Socrata’s face before disappearing into the crowd.

(Suffering is good for the soul, so Kara makes sure she suffers.)

Her first year in the academy, Kara decides her father’s story was right after all, even if nobody believes it anymore. The stars are where the gods live, because it’s only as she swoops forward, trying to touch them with her Viper, that she feels bliss (believes). It’s better than ambrosia, it’s better than sex. Her first time out of the simulator, she swoops her Viper in a descending circle, catching her downward spiral in beats.

For Aphrodite, who teaches love. For Artemis, who teaches strength.

(She doesn’t even realize she’s made the pattern until she dreams it that night.)

It was easier when she didn’t remember.

Her commander chews her out when she finally touches down, asks if she’s trying to go out in a blaze of glory, but Kara just laughs, claps him on the back, and tells him not to mollycoddle her. She gets her first trip to the brig but it’s Helo who comes to let her out, and warns her not to do it again.

She’s never been a good listener.

“You ever going to change?” he asks the third time she ends up in the brig, courtesy of Commander Ruth.

“You know me, Helo,” she answers from where she’s lounging against the bars. “I can’t stand jackasses.”

“Take a look in the mirror lately?” he retorts but he’s smiling, has probably heard the story by now. Ruth outranks even Kara in that department.

Besides, being in the brig is about the only time Kara’s alone with her thoughts anymore, and even if she can’t do anything about the pictures in her head, she likes knowing the pattern’s still there. Likes to keep an eye on the stranger at her back.

(Outside there are only other people asking questions and making jokes, jostling each other back and forth. Here and the cockpit are the closest things she’s got to an empty field anymore.)

Shore leave is the only rough part about being a pilot; it’s mandatory or Kara thinks she’d just hop from battlestar to battlestar, Viper after Viper, until she couldn’t go back to Caprica anymore, until she only belonged in space. Zak Adama’s the first one to call her on it, invites her out for a drink because if she’s drunk, she might not feel so grounded anymore.

It figures she’d fall for the one guy who didn’t belong in space in the first place.

She finds herself spending more time on Caprica, letting herself get talked into an apartment instead of crashing at hotels, and decorating the place as best they can. It’s not much and they never stay long but for once, Kara’s not looking at the stars.

Out of defiance, she starts painting the pattern again (blues, reds, yellows) and Zak doesn’t ask her what it is, just watches her paint the design in a growing circle on their entryway, tells her she should get a hobby.

He’s her hobby, she retorts, lets herself be grounded, just a while longer. Lets herself believe, just for a while, Zak’s ideas of life outside the stars, life with a two bedroom apartment and a dog they can’t afford. She feels empty, though, like she’s already been forgotten, like she doesn’t exist anymore if she’s not up there, swimming in the blackness.

It’s Lee’s visit that does it, reminds her she’s close to slipping over the edge, willing to do anything to make her mark. Shattered glass and Lee’s breath so close to her skin lift her, raise her up, far from this apartment and this rock, up somewhere else. It’s Lee who tries to bring her back down, back to her brother and another state of mind.

Still, she spends every day after that trying to reclaim where she used to be, before Lee and before Zak. It stays out of reach, and Kara grows reckless.

(She never should have tried to bring Zak up with her, but suffering is good for the soul (so she suffers.))

After the funeral, after her reassignment, Kara does her best to forget. Two years is plenty of time to forget the taste of one man who couldn’t, wasn’t mean to fly; two years is enough time to forget what he looks like outside the one picture she has left.

Two years is enough time to immortalize him and never want to see him again.

It’s only after the bombs fall, only after she remembers to breathe again, only after she decides this is worse than Dreilide leaving and worse than Zak dying and worse than Lee being right next to her on _Galactica_ that Kara starts running after an old dream, the only one she’s ever really had. The stars are all she’s got left (and the pattern draws back into sight).

It shows up in Leoben’s bloody water bucket, the light deceiving her eyes. It shows up in the clouds as she falls, black spots swimming into formation. It shows up to haunt her back on Caprica, from the last time she thought she could buck fate.

( _“Because they had a long way to come,”_ a memory reminds her.)

She doesn’t understand, doesn’t blame herself, figures if the gods wanted to, they could have (would have) saved every one of them a long time ago. No travelling, no bombs falling and no strange patterns appearing before a small child everywhere she looked. Because now Kara understands one thing, if just one – humans are just as exiled as the gods always were.

(Suffering is good for the soul, so they all suffer now.)

Lee comments on it one day, notices a recklessness in her flying and a swagger in her walk that wasn’t there before. There are a thousand souls dead in space, another thousand left to die back on Caprica, and Kara has to choose. She chooses forward motion, she chooses _having a long way to go_ and tells Lee she doesn’t have answers to questions he’s not ready to ask.

His hand still brushes against hers in the ready room, he still drags her out of her cot to run with him when she’s more hung over than any human has a right to be and he still looks at her like she’s worth something more than a Viper pilot.

It’s not the first time he let her slip through his fingers, back to something else outside his understanding.

“I don’t blame you,” he tells her when they escape from the Ragnar Anchorage, when they realize they’re up against more than they ever knew and it’s time to stop counting how many lives they owe each other.

“Yeah, you do,” she says, wishes he wouldn’t talk about it, wishes for blame, for absolution, for vengeance. Wishes she hadn’t told him, but only for a moment.

There’s a pause, a moment where he wants to push, but doesn’t (a lesson he’ll forget later).

“Maybe I do,” he says, and despite the clamoring of the other pilots, he’s built this quiet space between them. Out of nowhere, Kara feels a wisp of fear that maybe the wrong brother died. The one who’ll push her, who’ll fly neck for neck with her, who’ll reach just as far as she will, survived. There’s nothing holding her back now, to keep her from flying and falling as far as she’ll go.

It’s easiest to blame him.

“Don’t forget it,” she says before letting herself be pulled out of the moment, into the ring of cheering pilots. Today, of all days, Kara lets herself celebrate, doesn’t worry about the look on Lee’s face, left alone in a moment meant for two.

(Today, of all days, Kara sees Lee’s head ringed by a pattern of red and blue and gold. Feels her heart race, her hands sweat and throat close, and for the first time, doesn’t place the memory in its proper context.)

It only lasts a second, and then Lee and the pattern are gone, missed, and Kara turns into the crowd.

Because for now, there’s work to do and Cylons to kill. Kara decides to frak the details and screw fate.

And so three years later, when the pattern shows up again, when it’s so large it swallows her in one breath and when Leoben whispers words of comfort to her through the dying lips of her diseased mother, she’s already made her choice.

Kara spirals downward, flies into the void instead of out, because she’s not a god and though just as wretched as they are, she’s not a fugitive. Not from Lee, not from Cylons, and not from anyone.

She’ll be damned if she runs from her own frakking pattern.

_Finis_


End file.
